In the past few years, drug delivery systems have been used extensively to improve solubility, stability, and pharmacokinetics of chemotherapeutic drugs. However, traditional delivery systems fail to fulfill the required standard of effectiveness, primarily owing to issues of drug resistance exhibited by cancer cells and inherent differences among the patients. In this regard, combination therapy offers advantages of synergistic mechanism, reduced drug dosage, and enhanced therapeutic effect, which can be effectively utilized for the treatment of cancer. However, different types of therapeutic agents exhibit different pharmacokinetic properties and action targets in vivo, which lead to uncontrollable concentration ratio of therapeutic agents at the lesion site. This in turn causes serious side effects and affects synergistic anticancer effect. Importantly, multifunctional co-delivery systems are characterized by good pharmacokinetic properties, ability to provide targeted delivery, and controlled release in response to tumor microenvironment. Such delivery systems are widely used for co-delivery of therapeutic agents, which further assist in obtaining better synergistic anticancer effect, and can be potentially used for clinical application. Multifunctional co-delivery systems often exhibit complex structures and construction process. Since cyclodextrin is characterized by self-assembly property, it is possible to quickly construct cyclodextrin-based multifunctional co-delivery systems, with convenience and flexibility. The application of cyclodextrin in the construction of multifunctional co-delivery systems for cancer therapy has gained immense attention in the past few years. The present study provided overview of latest progress in the field of cyclodextrin-based multifunctional co-delivery systems for cancer synergistic therapy.
Keywords: co-delivery; cyclodextrin; self-assembly; synergistic therapy.
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